Mechanise or Perish! A statement more and more heard in oil palm industry circles. What is not heard often enough is how tough, how difficult it is to mechanise harvesting!

In this first post out of our ‘Mechanise or Perish’ series, Palm INNOV
will analyse that difficulty for you.

We will start with the improvement achieved by specialising workers as well as better mechanising the evacuation aspect.

This is when you will see that evacuation mechanisation did increase a cutter productivity from 3 hectares per day to 9 hectares per day per cutter! Yes 3 fold.

But it did not solve the oil palm industry core labour shortage issue.

Next, we will see that the new automated cutting machines proposed till 2022 unfortunately took productivity back from 9 hectares to only 3 hectares per day. This is way too expensive.

Then we will analyse a new solution bringing us back to the 9 hectares day per cutter but this time with a 50% reduction in the no longer available labour.

How this is going to be experimented by a handful of planters controlling 10% of all the world oil palm acreage will conclude our ‘Mechanise or Perish’ series.

Watch the Palm INNOV space and stay tuned for more.